10 Awesome apps for productivity and project management

For me as a creative entrepreneur, picking the right app can be a daunting task.

First of all, I’m only one person who’s already wearing 15 different hats, so carving out time to look for productivity software is difficult for me.

Secondly, once I figure out a system that works, I’m kind of set. I move on and turn my attention to the things that need fixing.

Need more clients? We just added 125+ videos, lessons, tools, and templates to our premium freelance community, Solidgigs. Get our weekly gig lists (packed with the best freelance jobs) and learn from some of the best minds in freelancing. Sign up in November starting at just $9.79/mo. Learn more »

And there’s no one looking over my shoulder saying, “wow, I just use <insert software> and that takes me half the time it takes you.”

Finally, I’m a bit frugal. While I like things that save me time and money, I don’t like to sign up for a monthly bill, especially if I fall off the bandwagon 2 months later.

I’m skeptical, too. Because anyone can say anything on a website, having a referral from a trusted peer (or blog) makes all the difference for me.

CoSchedule is a marketing management calendar to help you plan and publish your blog, content marketing, and social media.

Designed with the group publishing team in mind (but also very handy solo), CoSchedule offers a robust amount of features and a central calendar that helps you utilize a ton of other apps to effectively and efficiently publish content.

HelpScout is an email management tool designed to help you provide delightful customer support. Created for help desks and customer support teams (but applicable to other areas of business), this software allows your entire team to review and handle incoming email efficiently and quickly.

So much more than just a place where all of your email is contained in threads, HelpScout’s features include:

Traffic cop, which prevents you from sending a reply if another member has already responded or your client has sent another email while you were writing

Leave notes for other team members

Save email templates for common email replies

Tag emails to categorize conversations and monitor trends

Lots of reports (like busiest time of day, usage of tags and saved replies, most active customers, first response time, replies to resolve, etc.)

Assign conversations to team members

Bulk replies

Set email status

Probably my favorite feature is the saved replies, where I quickly pop off an email without having to type the same exact thing over and over (and over).

I also love the Traffic Cop, which has prevented me from sending multiple outdated emails where the client *just* updated me on what I was about to send.

And it’s super-handy to have multiple team members able to effortlessly (and flawlessly) manage the same inbox, so you don’t have to request clients to switch emails from new client outreach to project manager, for example.

Trello is a free visual way to organize projects (and lots of other “stuff). Whether you use it as a personal to-do list or to keep team project flow organized, Trello gives you an at-a-glance view of each project’s status.

The best thing about Trello is how quickly you can see the status of each project. And if you have a lot of Boards, you can star your most-used ones to quickly navigate around.

How about you?

What productivity and project management apps work best for you? Share them in the comments!

SHARE

Say Goodbye to Roller Coaster Income

Your income doesn't have to be a guessing game every month. Let 4 thriving solopreneurs show you how in our free guide.

About April Greer

April is the Director of Projects at Reliable PSD, a design-to-code company for designers, by designers. She’s the glue keeping everything together, organized, and right on time, and giving everyone a fantastic experience while she does it.

Harvest for super easy time tracking and invoicing. Join Me for video conferencing with a Gmail extension making it seamless to schedule (and soooo easy for clients to join the meeting). Teamwork is is like Basecamp but extremely robust and the best part is that it allows you to view all of your projects together instead one-by-one as Basecamp does. I’d be happy to answer any questions about any of these. I’ve used a lot of software and these recommendations have helped me tremendously.

Great list and we use most of these tools as well 🙂 But I think you are missing out Filecamp.com. It’s a Image Bank/File Sharing service where you can share files with your customers in a quite uniqe manner, and it allows you to create a custom look and feel for each of you customer. It´s about 40 USD/month but because of these private-label features, we are able to share the expense with our customers. So it´s a win-win, even for a small freelance business 🙂

Wow, awesome – thanks for sharing! I’ve been using Dropbox in conjunction with Basecamp, but sometimes it feels a bit clunky with screenshots and such as well as new folders of Fixes to keep straight which is which.

And our testers really find that it can be cumbersome to determine what something is supposed to look like with the original and multiple tweaks as we go along.

I tried 17Hats and originally thought it was going to be great. I kinda fell off the bandwagon, though, about 2 months in and find it’s kind of a hassle and hard to stick with, I think because it’s just one more thing to open and having running.

Great article. I am really a big fan of Basecamp. I also like trello. And as you said(in your article) you love trello 🙂 I am sure you’ll love http://www.nutcache.com as well. It is also as simple as Trello. Offers scrum boards to assign tasks with due dates as well as collaborative boards where team members, clients and other collaborators can share ideas, feedback, and documents. Tool is also integrated with several payment gateways.

Hi April. Thanks for putting such a useful list of apps!
I love Trello, we even tried it for several months in our team and it was really awesome. I wish we could try it again.

We’re actually a team of freelancers who mainly supports graphic design and SEO services for any clients around the world, and these apps you have listed are really helpful in completing our tasks. However, the most needed app that we always open before we start working is Time Doctor (similar to Toggl). It is a time tracking software for freelancers which helps track your time and productivity — the reports are very accurate, that’s why we stick to it for quite so long already.

Trying to reach freelancers & solopreneurs?

Like most blogs, we have several affiliate partners who share revenue with us when we send them new customers or leads.
These payments do not negatively affect the editorial integrity of our content. For more information, please read our Affiliate Policy.